The Gulf of Mexico. NASAThis year's hypoxia forecast forecast calls for the largest dead zone yet seen in the Gulf of Mexico. The report's just been released by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, aka LUMCON:

This [dead] zone continues to threaten living resources including humans that depend on fish, shrimp and crabs. Excess nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus, cause huge algae blooms whose decomposition leads to oxygen distress and even organism death in the Gulf's richest waters.

I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the full lineage of this unfolding disaster—starting with the polar jet stream.

Compare the position of the polar jet stream [purple] in these images of a typical El Niño and a La Niña, with the jet further south for La Niña. NOAA/Wikimedia
There's been an unusual La Niña-type jet stream dipping dip far south all through the spring. Jeff Masters at WunderBlog explains:

La Niña alters the path of the jet stream, making the predominant storm track in winter traverse the Midwest and avoid the South... La Niña's influence on the jet stream and U.S. weather typically fades in springtime... However, in 2011, the La Niña influence on U.S. weather stayed strong throughout spring... with wind speeds more typical of winter than spring... A series of strong storms moved along the jet stream and pulled up warm, moist Gulf of Mexico air, which mixed with the cold air spilling south from Canada.

Sea surface temperature anomalies on 4 April 2011. NOAAThat collision of air masses spawned a lot of precipitation—particularly because of this year's warmer-than-normal waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Masters continues:

Sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Gulf of Mexico warmed to 1°C (1.8°F) above average during April—the third warmest temperatures in over a century of record keeping... These unusually warm surface waters allowed much more moisture than usual to evaporate into the air, resulting in unprecedented rains over the Midwest when the warm, moist air swirled into the unusually cold air spilling southwards from Canada. With the jet stream at exceptional winter-like strengths, the stage was also set for massive tornado outbreaks.

Above: North Dakota, 12 Dec 2010. Below: swollen lower Mississippi River, 1 June 2011. NASAIn the two images above, taken six months apart, you can see how winter's heavy snows, pounded by spring's heavy snowmelts and ongoing heavy rains, changed the Mississippi landscape... and—ultimately—the seascape.

Mississippi River sediment in the Gulf of Mexico. NASAThe problem—as I wrote earlier—is all the stuff in the floodwaters that isn't riverwater, namely fertilizers and other enrichers, like manure, which are the drivers behind the dead zone.

Put the weather, the floods, the farms, and the poo together and you get LUMCON's particularly gloomy hypoxia forecast:

The June 2011 forecast of the size of the hypoxic zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico for July 2011 is that it will cover between 22,253 to 26,515 km2 (average 24,400 km2; 9,421 mi2) of the bottom of the continental shelf off Louisiana and Texas. The predicted hypoxic area is about the size of the combined land area of New Jersey and Delaware, or the size of Lake Erie. The estimate is based on the May nitrogen loading (as nitrate+nitrite) from the Mississippi watershed to the Gulf of Mexico estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey. If the area of hypoxia becomes this large, then it will be the largest since systematic mapping of the hypoxic zone began in 1985.

Long-term measured size of Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone with 2011 forecast. Dark gray represents the range of ensemble forecast. Nancy Rabalais LUMCON/NOAAThus an initial problem with farmers incidentally fertilizing the ocean unto death is now compounded by a rapidly-shifting climate locked and loaded with unpredictable and wild extremes. As Jeff Masters writes:

One thing we can say is that since global ocean temperatures have warmed about 0.6°C (1°F) over the past 40 years, there is more moisture in the air to generate record flooding rains. The near-record warm Gulf of Mexico SSTs this April that led to record Ohio Valley rainfalls and the 100-year $5 billion+ flood on the Mississippi River would have been much harder to realize without global warming.

The growing dead zone would be slower to realize without global warming too... Another entanglement in the double helix connecting land to air to sea.

Jerome Walker, Dennis Myts/Wikimedia Commons.

Crossposted from Deep Blue Home.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

California has some of the dirtiest air in the nation. Consequently, it has some of the strictest rules for gasoline, meaning it burns cleaner than it does in many other states. But cleaner fuels are more expensive.

Clean air requirements, combined with supply and refining constraints, make the price of California gas consistently among the highest in the nation. Turmoil in the Middle East is another factor that pushes up the global price of crude oil. Even though the average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gas in California fluctuates around $4, some experts argue that $4 a gallon is much less than the real cost.

Watch an animated video, produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting, that explores the "external costs" of gas consumption–including the price of pollution and health problems caused by it:

Compared with other industrialized countries, the US has it cheap. The Economist notes that American consumers pay about half of what Europeans pay, which is up to about $8.50 per gallon (or $2.25 per liter). The media website Good has a nifty chart showing the disparity in prices across the Atlantic, and PBS' NewsHour explains the effect Middle East turmoil has on the retail price of gas. While politicians on both sides of the aisle bicker about why gas is expensive, US Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., is one who explains the real reasons, and as Grist reporter David Roberts notes, he is lonely in doing so.

[Read more]

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

Actor Mark Ruffalo is busy these days getting to smash things and save the world as the Incredible Hulk in the upcoming movie The Avengers. But even though he can't turn huge and green to show it, there's one thing that really makes him angry: fracking.

Last week the Natural Resources Defense Council released a video wherein Ruffalo and some fellow New York actors confess that they "love their New York water," and ask the state to hold off on allowing the controversial natural gas extraction method known as "fracking" at a proposed site in the Marcellus Shale formation in southern New York.

Ruffalo lives near the Delaware River, and has been closely following the issue for three years, he said, after he took a trip to a town in Pennsylvania where fracking was taking place and saw "a community completely torn apart."

[Read more]

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

An Econundrums reader recently asked a good question about how best to charge laptop and smart phone batteries:

Is it better for the battery to charge laptops and phones fully and then run them down all the way, or to charge them a little bit every day? And which way uses less energy?

The answer is complicated, since it depends on the particular product in question, explains Suzanne Foster Porter of Ecos, a Colorado-based consulting company that works on energy efficiency of battery chargers, in everything from MP3 players to forklifts. While some older battery chargers continue to draw power from the grid even when the battery is fully charged, more modern chargers are smarter: They basically turn off once the device is done charging. "But it's difficult to tell which kind you have, since manufacturers aren't required to tell consumers," says Porter. 

That could change soon: Porter says Energy Star plans to develop a new label for charger efficiency. (There's already this one, but it only applies to a narrow range of products.) Until then, you can follow these general guidelines:

When plugged into a charger, products that use nickel-cadmium and nickel-metal hydride batteries often draw power even when they're fully charged. Electric razors, power tools, and some small appliances commonly use this kind of battery. You should "only charge these items right before you're going to use them since they use quite a bit of energy when they're plugged in," says Porter.

But modern lithium-ion batteries, the kind in most laptops and cell phones, are generally very good at knowing when a product is fully charged. Porter says that's because there's a safety issue: They could actually explode (remember that?) if they become overcharged. (That said, you should unplug your charger from the wall when you're not using it. Most models still use energy even when they're not charging anything, though that may change soon.)

The charge-every-day method is also better for the battery than running it down and doing a "deep charge" every once in a while, says Isidor Buchmann, CEO of Cadex, a company in British Columbia that manufactures and analyzes battery chargers. Daily charging puts less stress on the battery and thus makes it last longer. A few other tips from Buchmann for prolonging the life of lithium-ion batteries: Keep charged devices in rooms that don't get hotter than 86 degrees Fahrenheit, since heat can damage the batteries, especially when they're fully charged. For that reason, avoid placing devices on pillows and other surfaces that will restrict air flow during charging. Also try not to leave devices in an empty-battery state for too long; this could shorten the battery life.

More about lithium-ion battery chemistry and more handy tips here. 

Got a burning eco-quandary? Submit it to econundrums@motherjones.com. Get all your green questions answered by visiting Econundrums on Facebook here.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet